Facebook Starts Mobile Payments in France

By Nick Clayton

Smartphone customers of France Telecom 's Orange can pay directly for services on Facebook, such as virtual gifts and games credits, through their phone bills. The service will be powered by Bango, as it is in the U.S., Germany and the U.K. which were the first countries to go live in September.

Subscribers will be able to pay for content which uses Facebook’s HTML5 environment. Orange is France’s largest mobile carrier with 26 million subscribers, according to TechCrunch.

Bango says that users connecting using WiFi also get access to the payment facility, and the service works across iOS, Android, Windows Phone and bada devices.

The promise of carrier billing is that it is significantly easier to execute, requiring only two clicks, and therefore has a higher conversion rate among consumers. Bango — which also works with BlackBerry (powering carrier billing in its App World), Windows Phone Store, Amazon and individual brands like CNN and EA Mobile — says that conversion rates for carrier-billing can be up to 77%, compared to 40% for other mobile-based billing services like premium SMS or credit cards.

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